|
The Army has two basic tactical land mobile radio systems: SINCGARS and VRC-12.
The SINCGARS is nice. It is a "freq-hopper" which means that it changes the frequency it's tuned to several times a second so it can't be intercepted, jammed or located. (You tell it what frequencies you want it to use.) It can communicate with the Racal and Rohde+Schwartz freq-hoppers everyone else in NATO has. It's small and, for a tactical radio, fairly light weight. They have brackets for vehicle use, backpack frames so you can walk around with it, a whole range of accessories. Like I said, it's nice. It's also scarce, ten years after they started fielding it.
One thing you must know: the United States is dead last in its efforts to field a freq-hopper to its troops. The rest of NATO went to freq-hoppers shortly after they were invented, with the sad result that when there were joint-force exercises involving the US and any other country, the non-US force had a US radio parked next to its freq-hopper. Racal and R+S fell down on their sacred duty to put a "talk to the cheapskate Americans" switch on their high-tech radios that would turn off the freq-hopper mode.
The other system is VRC-12, which describes a whole range of equipment. All of it has three salient features: it's old, it's huge and it breaks down a lot.
How old? I went to Basic Training in November 1981. In December they took us to the Committee Group communications training building and introduced us to the PRC-77 (the VRC-12-family radio that runs off a battery) with "this radio is older than anyone in this room." Including all the drill sergeants but one. The RT-524, which mounts in a vehicle, has a label on top: "Two Man Lift. Do Not Use Front Panel Handles To Lift This Radio." If you pick it up by the handles, the handles will fall off and let the radio fall on your toes, and the radio weighs about 70 pounds. (There are steel-toed Army boots, but they're only issued to people like combat engineers.)
It is so big that, in the trucks these Guardsmen have, the radio sits in a bracket that mounts behind the cab.
If the radios get over a certain temperature (like, say, the temp you'd see in a radio that's sitting in a bracket on the outside of your truck when you're in Iraq), it stops working. On purpose. It has an "overheat" mode to keep the radio, which has three vacuum tubes in it, from melting. The only real solution (besides putting the ancient Army radio back in the supply room and mounting anything else) is to get a wool Army blanket, fold it to the size of your radio, saturate it in water and bungee-cord it to the top of the radio. That works okay.
So no, I'm not shocked that the Guardsmen want to use CB radios. Given the choice between a several-thousand-dollar radio that is forty years out of date and stops working if it gets too hot, or a $50 CB from Radio Shack that works all the time, which would you take?
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
